PhD Defence Yuanting Wen | Beyond Leadership Behaviors- A Multi-Context Study of How Perceptual Alignment and Psychological Empowerment Drive Employee Entrepreneurial Action

Beyond Leadership Behaviors- A Multi-Context Study of How Perceptual Alignment and Psychological Empowerment Drive Employee Entrepreneurial Action

Yuanting Wen is a PhD student in the department Entrepreneurship, Technology, Management. (Co)Promotors are dr. R. Harms and prof.dr. T. Bondarouk from the faculty of Behavioural Management and Social Sciences (BMS), University of Twente.

This dissertation systematically investigated how employees’ subjective perceptions of leadership influence their entrepreneurial behavior through a carefully designed four-study progression. The overarching research question, examining the interplay between leadership perceptions, psychological empowerment, and employees’ entrepreneurial behavior across contexts, demanded a multi-method, multi-context approach that could capture both the breadth and depth of this complex phenomenon.

The research journey began with Chapter 2’s integrative literature review, which served as the methodological and theoretical foundation. This study employed Torraco's (2005) integrative review methodology to synthesize 116 empirical articles published between 2015-2025. The systematic search across Web of Science and Scopus, using keyword combinations of leadership (in)congruence and employee entrepreneurial behavior, yielded 2,172 initial records, refined through PRISMA guidelines to the final dataset. This chapter's analytical approach involved thematic synthesis and configurational mapping, identifying patterns across studies rather than merely cataloging findings. The review’s primary function was diagnostic. It revealed that existing research remained fragmented across three theoretical domains (implicit leadership theory, person-environment fit, and leader-member exchange) that rarely engaged in dialogue. By mapping these dispersed insights onto a unified framework, this chapter identified the critical gap: no study had systematically examined how different forms of leadership (in)congruence combine to influence entrepreneurial behavior.

Chapter 3 operationalized the theoretical framework through the first empirical investigation, strategically selecting leadership transitions as an extreme case where perceptual dynamics become most salient. The two-wave survey design captured 68 matched responses from faculty and staff experiencing a dean transition at a Dutch university. The methodological innovation lay in the comparative measurement approach, in which respondents evaluated each transformational leadership dimension by directly comparing the current dean with the predecessor. This design choice emerged from Chapter 2’s insight that employees engage in temporal comparisons rather than absolute evaluations. The selection of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis reflected the configurational nature revealed in the literature review. The calibration process used the 95th, 50th, and 5th percentiles to transform raw change scores into fuzzy set memberships, enabling analysis of how combinations of leadership changes and empowerment dimensions produce entrepreneurial behavior.

Chapter 4 represented a deliberate methodological pivot to test the robustness and boundaries of the perceptual framework. The shift to family firm successions in China served three methodological purposes: testing generalizability across radically different cultural and organizational contexts, examining whether comparative evaluations operate similarly in emotion-laden succession contexts, and investigating sequential rather than configurational relationships. The study's design involved 203 non-family employees across 22 family firms rating leadership similarity using an innovative five-point comparative scale (1=“applies much more to past leader” to 5=“applies much more to current leader”). The choice of PLS-SEM over fsQCA reflected the theoretical model's focus on mediation, specifically examining how similarity perceptions influence entrepreneurial behavior through psychological empowerment. The measurement model incorporated both reflective and formative constructs, with PLSc addressing the inconsistency issues inherent in traditional PLS when handling reflective measurements.

Chapter 5 completed the empirical trilogy by pushing the framework to its limits in high-tech contexts where employee expertise might theoretically override leadership influence. This study’s methodological contribution involved operationalizing expectation gaps through mathematical differences between ideal and actual leadership ratings: a more precise measurement than the comparative approaches in previous chapters. The return to fsQCA reflected the theoretical expectation of complex substitution effects in knowledge-intensive settings. The calibration approach and analytical procedures paralleled Chapter 3, enabling methodological comparison while the context provided maximum theoretical contrast. The inclusion of post hoc interviews with representative cases from each configuration added qualitative depth to the configurational findings, validating the practical meaning of abstract set-theoretic results.

The four chapters interconnect through progressive theoretical elaboration and methodological triangulation. Chapter 2’s comprehensive mapping revealed the phenomenon's configurational nature and identified three forms of (in)congruence requiring investigation. Chapter 3 tested the framework in a structured transition context using comparative evaluations and configurational analysis. Chapter 4 examined whether the perceptual mechanisms held in emotionally-charged successions using different cultural contexts and analytical methods. Chapter 5 explored boundary conditions in expert-employee contexts while returning to configurational methods with refined measurement approaches.

Methodologically, this progression from synthesis to multi-method empirical investigation serves several critical functions. First, it demonstrates convergent validity: core findings about perceptual primacy and psychological empowerment’s dual role emerge across different methods and contexts. Second, it reveals boundary conditions: the varying importance of specific leadership dimensions across contexts could only emerge through systematic comparison. Third, it enables theoretical refinement: each study’s findings informed subsequent design choices, creating cumulative knowledge building rather than parallel investigations.

The dissertation’s structural design reflects deliberate choices about phenomenon-method fit. The integrative review's breadth captured the theoretical landscape's complexity. FsQCA’s set-theoretic logic aligned with the non-linear, substitutable relationships between leadership perceptions and entrepreneurial behavior. PLS-SEM’s capacity for complex mediation modeling matched the sequential theoretical model in family firm contexts. The multi-method approach transcends methodological ideology, instead selecting analytical tools that optimally match each research question's theoretical and empirical demands.

This systematic progression from theoretical synthesis through diverse empirical investigations enables the dissertation to make claims about both the universality and contextual boundaries of leadership perception effects. The consistent finding that perceptions matter more than objective behaviors gains credibility through replication across methods and contexts. The varying configurational patterns demonstrate that while perceptual processes are universal, their specific manifestations remain context-dependent. Together, these four interconnected studies provide a comprehensive understanding of how employees’ leadership experiences shape their entrepreneurial behavior, which no single study or method could achieve alone.